


Starving Faithful

by andchaos



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Gen, Mentions of Sex, Mild Language, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 19:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3301574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchaos/pseuds/andchaos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“There’s nothing for me here”—but Mandy keeps calling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starving Faithful

**Author's Note:**

> I missed Mandy so bad last week, that I wrote this just to have more time with her and Ian together. Not sorry!  
> Title (was so close to being from another Maroon 5 song!) is from Take Me To Church because I've had that stuck in my head all day, and half of yesterday.  
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          The thing about Indiana is, it isn’t the worst place in the entire world.

The other thing about Indiana is that it pretty much _is_ Fucksville, USA, which makes this one of the few times Mandy will actually concede that one of her brothers was right.

          She _physically_ settles in pretty easily, considering she didn’t pack up everything she owned so she only has two suitcases. Although initially she just throws everything on the floor of her— _their_ —bedroom, Kenyatta spends most of the day at his stupid shitty day job, and over the first week or so she starts to put away her few possessions.

          Getting emotionally settled is a little more difficult. She may have sworn that there was nothing for her in Chicago, but repeating that to herself in the mirror doesn’t erase from her mind the puppy look her best friend gave her when she first decided to go, the one he perfected over the years; nor did it entirely diminish the sound of her brother in her ears, screaming at her all the way down the front walk and through the car window as she buckled herself into the passenger seat of Kenyatta’s beat-up, most likely stolen, car.

          “The fuck are you doing, Mandy?” Mickey asked, grabbing at her arm as she tried to descend the front steps. “You don’t gotta prove anything, you know.”

          “Fuck you,” she snapped, wrenching herself free.

          “You don’t gotta—damn it, Mandy! We _know_ you can take care of yourself, okay? Everybody fucking knows that! Don’t…you don’t have to go, okay?”

          She opened her mouth to say something else contemptuous, but then just shook her head, eyes cast downwards and anywhere away from her brother.

          “There’s nothing for me here,” she repeated. Maybe if she said it enough, her heart would stop aching every time she did.

          Mickey reared back as though slapped, faltering on the steps. Mandy took the opportunity to put more distance between them, and she was halfway down the front walk before Mickey found his voice.

          “Fucking fine then!” he shouted. “How about we just go back inside then?” She turned, about to sneer that she _didn’t_ want to fucking go back inside, but the sentence died in her throat. Ian had appeared in the doorway, and suddenly it was abundantly clear whom Mickey had meant by “we”. She must have looked hurt, because Mickey raised his eyebrows the way he did when gearing up to fight even harder, aware that he had gained ground, no matter how small that ground was. “Yeah, that good then? Since we mean _nothing_ …” He shot her another scathing look. “We’ll just head in then. That good with you? No reason to say goodbye or anything!”

          Mandy felt her throat close up, choking on the tears she refused to let fall, and held her head high like she always did. She didn’t trust her voice, so she just flipped them both off and turned away.

          “Do whatever the fuck you want,” she said, once she no longer had to look at them.

          Ian and Mickey stood on the porch as she drove away, Ian giving her that sad, beseeching look— _why are you abandoning me?_ , he seemed to ask, even from afar—and Mickey shouting, “Fuck you, Mandy! You don’t have to fucking do this!” But she already had.

          She sighs now, flipping over the omelet she’s making and looking out the window. The sky is a vibrant blue, like she feels she hasn’t seen in awhile, and she can see the neighbor out gardening his tulips again. She puked in that flowerbed last week; she wonders if he’s noticed. He must not have, because he usually comes over to complain about everything she does. She kind of wants him to knock on her door and attempt to bitch her out, as she thinks it’s funny when he gets upset. He would know it was her, too, because she can’t imagine anyone else in the neighborhood threw up in someone else’s bushes. They may not live in a snooty rich suburb, but this street isn’t nearly as rough as the Southside.

          She finally shuts the stove off and dumps her food onto a plate, scrounging a fork from the mess in one of the drawers and stretching out on the couch in the living room. Breakfast for lunch never fails to pick up her mood, and big sad green eyes have been haunting her all morning.

          She digs in, but even the combination of eggs, cheese, and tomato—long since perfected—won’t fight back the ghosts hard enough to drive them out completely. Each bite seems to trigger another memory—one thousand and one breakfasts with Ian, sitting a million miles away, eating omelets and fucking around.

          A few months into their friendship, back when Mandy striped her hair with vibrant colors but after her crush on Ian had faded into dust, they ate breakfast together. Nothing new, but Mandy had spent all night bragging about how well she made omelets, and Ian had instructed her to prove it when they woke up. She spent an extra long time cooking that morning, getting everything just right. Ian had just gotten back from a long stint in the bathroom— _no,_ shit. Ian had been fucking her brother, she knows now. She still has to correct herself sometimes, puzzle the memories into place properly even though she thought she had it right before. Anyway—he had been a long time in Mickey’s room, doing things she still doesn’t want to think about, and they threw themselves onto the couch so they could pick up their Call of Duty match from the night before.  Ian spent so much time moaning around her cooking that he ended up losing spectacularly, and even though he insisted that she had sabotaged him with excellent chef skills and demanded a rematch, she refused to acknowledge his complaint and spent the next twenty minutes dancing victory laps around the living room, gloating so loud that Mickey eventually came out of his room—hair ruffled, sleepy smile satisfied, all vestiges of what she incorrectly assumed was just a good night’s sleep—to tell her to shut up unless she wanted him to shoot her. She stuck her tongue out, triumph still filling her chest. And then, Ian, and his big, sad, begging eyes—always, always, always getting what they want. She ended up granting him the rematch, and kicked his ass again, though by a much narrower margin.

          Mandy groans and presses the heels of her palms into her eyes. She’s blonde now, no color striping her hair. The beginning of summer seemed such a good time for a new start, when the air smelled like freedom and vacations, and she thought bleaching her hair was as good a way as any to become somebody, anybody else. But she’s still just Mandy Milkovich. And omelets still taste good, and tall redheads with the roundest eyes she’s ever seen still make her heart feel like pieces are crumbling off into her stomach.

          She shoves her half-eaten food away from her, feeling suddenly sick. What the fuck was she thinking? Going blonde didn’t make her any happier, and moving to Indiana isn’t erasing her memories of Chicago, scratching out her past to make room for her future. She’s still just Mandy Milkovich, black and red and bruised. She’s bar fights and a baton, brawls on the train, a shiv in the hand on her knee.

          She wants to throw up all over the coffee table. More than that, she wants her best friend. And since she can’t feasibly run back home, she does the next best thing and goes to find her cell phone.

          _There’s nothing for me here_ —but she keeps calling.

          She curls up back on the couch, one arm wrapped around the knees drawn to her chest, the phone pressed to her ear, ringing and ringing and ringing. She thinks maybe no one will pick up. Ian was only getting worse when she left—oh God, what if everything finally fell apart? What if Ian’s been hospitalized? What if Svetlana picks up and tells her that Ian snapped and he and Mickey ran away to get some peace to get his head back in order? Her heartrate picks up, because oh God, if she really has nothing—if the last piece keeping her sane vanished, and she has absolutely nothing to keep her grounded anymore—the room starts to spin, and she’s hyperventilating by the time the ringing stops.

          She’s about to hang up before the voicemail can kick in, but before she can, a voice comes through—and it’s not telling her to leave a message.

          “Hello?”

          Her feet drop to the floor, flat and heavy. She lets out a rushed breath, exhaling away her momentary panic.

          “Oh God— _Ian_ ,” she breathes, her head falling back onto the couch.

          “Mandy?” Ian asks over the line, and she thinks he sounds much happier than he did a second ago.

          “Yeah, it’s me,” she says. She can’t keep the giddiness from creeping into her voice. For a minute, she feels a little less alone.

          “Hey!” Ian says. She hears talking in the background, and she imagines that the house is full. Mickey’s probably getting dressed for work right about now, and Svetlana’s trying to feed Yevgeny based on the crying she can detect, because the baby hates eating lunch. Colin and Iggy are probably throwing cereal at each other as they fight over the day’s job, and Joey’s most likely still asleep. She smiles a little, imagining the house bursting and busy and alive.

          “How are you?” she asks, because she wants him to say that he’s seeing a psychiatrist regularly and that Mickey is driving him insane keeping him to his medication schedule.

          But he doesn’t, of course. He laughs instead. “Great, actually,” he tells her, even though she doubts it’s true. “I just got back from my run. Got a late start today, so I did an extra long one, through the park.”

          “The park?”

          “Yeah, remember the one where Ashley Heidewitz threw up after the Halloween party two years ago?”

          “Yeah. You mean the one with the heroin needles all over the swings?” she asks, and giggles a little. “Jeez, kid, find a sketchier place to do your jogging! You’re too pretty a package. The crackheads will eat you alive.”

          “The more they chase me, the faster I have to run,” Ian says jokingly.

          “Fine, but I’m not driving down to identify your body when the cops find your corpse under the lake.”

          “I don’t think they’d have the foresight to throw me in the lake,” Ian says with mock thoughtfulness. “I’d probably just end up on the side of the road. I doubt they’d even remember to remove my prints and dentals and stuff, so I could definitely still be identified even if I get run over a few times.”

          Mandy wrinkles her nose, and she rolls to lay down across the entire couch, staring up at the cracked plaster above her. She misses her best friend like a chunk out of her chest. Her eyes trace the path of the ceiling fan, watching it spin incessantly on. Spiraling, always spiraling. Like she always is, nowadays. “You’re so gross,” she says affectionately into the phone. “Morbid little freak, is what you are.”

          His soft laughter filters through the bad connection. “Oh yeah? _I’m_ a freak? Well at least I didn’t move out of town but manage to leave my _vibrator_ sitting in my bedside table.”

          Mandy groans, slapping her hand over her eyes. “Oh my god. You found that? I was wondering where that went, I figured it was in one of the unpacked boxes.”

          “Yeah, we found it.”

          “Shit,” she sighs. “Wait, _we_ found it? Oh my god, you didn’t like, use it or anything, did you?”

          Ian lets out an offended scoff from the back of his throat. “No!” Then his tone turns instantly lascivious. “Mickey doesn’t like vibrators and stuff anyway.”

          Mandy slaps her hand against the back of the couch, wishing it were Ian’s head, but before she can say anything more than, “Fuck, gross!” she hears more shouting in the background of Ian’s end, getting louder and louder until she can distinctly recognize the timbre of her brother’s voice, and then he’s right by the receiver and she can actually understand him, too.

          “Gallagher, what the fuck? Who the fuck are you talking to? Don’t tell people that shit, what the fuck—gimme the phone— _give me the goddamn phone_ —”

          Ian’s still talking over him, now outright laughing as he continues, “Yeah, I mean, he’s not into the dildos and stuff, but he once showed me these beads he keeps in the back of his sock drawer—”

          “Ian!” Mandy yelps, and Mickey lets out a stream of imaginative curses, but Ian’s still going—

          “—but I might try it on him, who knows. We’ll mail you back your stuff after we try it out— _shit!_ Get off me! What the hell, stop it!”

          He’s no longer talking to her, obviously; Mickey must have effectively drawn his attention. Mandy sinks back down onto the couch while she waits out Ian and Mickey’s fight, using the time to swallow the bile that had risen in her throat. They’re still shouting at each other, over each other, and she can barely make out the words anymore. She thinks they must have dropped the phone, because they both sound like background noise after a minute. She leans over to take another bite of her omelet while she waits. Finally, a crackle comes over the line and she assumes someone’s picked up again, so she swallows hastily while whoever it is clears his throat.

          “Sorry about that.” It’s Ian, of course, blithe as always after winning a fight. “What was I saying?”

          “Something meant to scar me for life?” Mandy suggests.

          “Oh, right. Well, never mind, he threatened to go celibate if I kept talking,” he says, and Mandy grins. Yeah, right would Mickey ever stop fucking—she used to take out the trash sometimes, she knows exactly how many used tissues were in his garbage. Ian continues, “So I’ll just box up some of the shit you left behind if you text me your new address.”

          “Shit, I thought I gave that to Joey before I left.”

          “Well, Joey got thrown back in jail, so…”

          “Really? What, did he fuck up his probation again?” Mandy asks. Joey’s arrest record is almost the size of Terry’s, although his crimes are usually petty rather than violent.

          “Yep. Went on a coke run, came back with half the stash missing. And he had a meeting with his PO the next day, which he bombed, so…you can guess what happened to the missing stuff.”

          Mandy shakes her head. “What a fucking idiot.”

          “Yeah. Iggy was pissed.”

          “I can imagine. He must’ve gotten one hell of an ass-kicking for losing that much with the middle-man.”

          “He’s still laid up,” Ian admits, then goes on to quickly reassure, “but he’s fine! He’ll _be_ fine, anyway.”

          “Good,” she says, shifting to lay her arm under her head. Iggy is probably her second-favorite brother. Not that she consciously acknowledges favorites.

          There’s a silence, not necessarily uncomfortable. Quiet with Ian was never a problem, even though it was rare considering he never really shuts up. She just feels weird listening to his breathing on the other line, and wishes she was feeling it instead, her head laid on his chest. If she were home right now, they would probably be listening to whatever new band Ian has discovered this week—he hears all kinds of shit at the club, and he always brings back CDs of the bands he really likes. They used to lay on the floor of her room, passing a bowl back and forth, laying on or against one another with a bag of chips propped up on someone’s thigh. Listening to new music, and feeling each other breathe.

          Naturally, he’s the one to break the silence. Although his words are curious, his tone determinedly chipper, she can hear how somber he sounds underneath them. Maybe he’s thinking of new music, too.

          “How are you liking Indiana?”

          For just a split second, she hesitates. She almost tells him everything.

          But then she stops herself. Ian is her best friend. He sounds…happy, play-fighting with Mickey and getting along with her other brothers, even bonding with Svetlana and the kid. He’s happy, but he’s sick, too. And either way he doesn’t deserve Mandy’s troubles.

          “It’s great,” she forces herself to say, and she even grins, wide and false and terrifying, up at the ceiling. She says it again, grins wider—says it to herself a few times. She thinks it hard enough that she almost believes it, and stares upwards, and above her the ceiling fan swings on and on and on.

          She can tell, though, from the thickness of his voice when he answers, that Ian doesn’t believe her even a little bit. “That’s great,” he echoes.

          “How are you?” she says quickly, hoping to divert the conversation away from herself.

          “Great,” he says, also too fast.

          She wants to ask how he’s doing, but she doesn’t. In the past they might have cracked open beers and sprawled out on the couch in the living room and pried out each other’s pain and secrets, trying to fix them, trying to fix whatever’s going on in their heads. They might have spent all night trying to sort it all through. But today they’ve both got too much to hide to risk unearthing someone else’s thoughts, in case they’re the ones who have to spill everything next.

          “That’s…that’s good,” she says, because if either one of them says _great_ again she’s going to throw something. “So everything’s…”

          “Good, yeah,” he finishes. He takes a deep breath, but before he can say anything else, she realizes that this conversation is far too much, and she interrupts him to change the subject.

          “How’s Colin doing without Joey and Iggy? Don’t tell me that fuckhead’s making runs all by himself now? He’d get murdered the first time he went out.”

          Ian gives a breathy laugh, obviously relieved at her diversion, and goes into a lengthy story about how Colin tried to collect off a few meth heads last week, only to wake up three days later, without pants, waist-deep in trash at the dump.

          Mandy laughs during the pauses after every other sentence, because although his storytelling isn’t half as good as she’s making it out to be, it’s nice just to lay on the couch with her best friend’s voice in her ear.

 

They talk for a very long time; noon long since comes and goes before she even bothers to look over at the clock, and when she does, she sits up with a start.

          “Oh, shit!” she hisses, right over the last half of Ian’s sentence.

          “—and Debbie _punched_ her in the face, I almost want to…Mandy?”

          “Yeah, shit, I’m here. Shit.” She scrubs her hand over her eyes, probably smearing her eyeliner a little, but she doesn’t care. “Fuck, I’m so sorry Ian, I have to go—I have a job interview in like, twenty minutes and I’m not even dressed—”

          “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Ian assures her, but it _isn’t_ okay. She hasn’t spoken to him in so long, and at the thought of hanging up on him now, the warm, bubbly feeling that settled in her stomach begins to simmer down, and she panics a little at the thought. This is the first time she’s been truly calm and happy since she moved here, and the idea that she has to go soon sends her pulse racing without her permission. She wants to relax, just for a few more minutes. She wants to stay here with Ian. He goes on,

          “Seriously, it’s no big deal. You got an interview, though? That’s awesome, I didn’t know you were looking for work. Where’s the place?”

          “Two blocks over,” she says, collapsing against the back of the couch again. “It’s just some stupid chain restaurant. Only slightly less shitty than the waffle house I was at back ho—back in Chicago.”

          “Well, that’s great!” he says, and he even sounds sincere. She doesn’t know why it makes her stomach hurt a little.

          She’s sick of all the _great_ s this conversation has had, but she manages a wobbly smile. “Yeah, it is. But for real, I have to get changed—these jeans have rips all up the knee, and my shirt smells like nicotine. But uh—I’ll call you back later, okay? When I’m making dinner or something.”

          “Sounds perfect,” Ian says, and if he sounds a little sad, neither of them mention it. “Hey, I hope you get it. The job, I mean. I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

          “Yeah,” she says.

          She inhales a little, not wanting to hang up. She thinks she hears Ian’s suspended breathing on the other line, but neither of them verbalize whatever it is they’re thinking. After a few seconds she realizes that there’s nothing really left to say, and finally presses down on the _End_ button.

          She imagines Ian, two hundred miles away, a dial tone sounding in his ear. She looks down at the cell phone cupped in her palms on her lap and mutters, “’Bye.”

          Time slows for a minute; she stares down at the phone for a long time. Then she shakes her head a little, just to get it back on track— _change into nicer jeans, find a jacket, maybe put on wedges_ —and tosses her cell onto the couch, jumping to her feet and heading for her room. She pauses halfway there to look into a mirror hanging on the wall, a little one just high enough that she can see her face in it.

          Her hair’s sticking up in the back from laying down for three hours, and her makeup’s a little smudged from when she ran her hands over her face earlier. She brushes her fingers through her hair a few times, trying to tame it a little, then gives up and just sweeps her bangs out of her eyes, letting out a heavy sigh. She stares at her reflection for a little while longer before muttering, “Whatever,” and slouching into her room.

 

          She just makes it to the interview, and she thinks she aces it because the guy who’s doing it is definitely high when she shows up. A few days later they call to let her know she got the job, and that same night she finishes unpacking the rest of the stuff sitting in boxes in the entryway.

          As she collapses into bed later, she stares up at the ceiling, the fan going around and around above her head. She thinks, _See? There’s a lot more for me here_ , and believes it for a full ten seconds before rolling over to dig her cell phone out of the bedside table. It rings four times before someone picks up.

          “Mandy?” the voice on the other end grumbles. “What the hell? It’s like three a.m.”

          She grins. “Hey, Ian.”

          She breathes out. He begins to tell her about this big plan he’s just formulated—something about missing bags and airports—and she settles in to listen. For just a little while, she feels like everything might turn out okay.


End file.
